Tom McCarthy - C

“Philo was a Jewish Platonist,” Petrou continues, “but the Christians picked up the Logos baton and ran with it. For them, Sophia’s a sad figure, symbol of our descent. Valentinus-an Alexandrian too-has her undone by love: desiring too ardently to be united with God, she falls into matter, and our universe is formed out of her agony and remorse.” Petrou’s eyes shift to Serge’s chest as he continues: “As an unknown theologian-yet another Alexandrian-wrote of her: ‘She is more beautiful than the sun and all the order of stars: being compared to light she is found beyond it…’ ”

It’s dusk; the museum’s rooms and corridors are murky. The two men stand quite static, Petrou sideways-on to Serge, his gaze fixed on his chest-as though they, too, were sculptures, syncretic overlays of eras and mythologies, gods, mortals and their relics. They remain like this as Petrou continues, in a voice becoming fainter all the time, his recitation:

“ ‘For after this cometh night…’ ”

His words trail off. Serge turns away from him, towards the window. Through it, in the gloaming, he can see a firefly pulsing photically, in dots and dashes.

The train to Cairo runs through the Wady Natrun soda fields. Serge knows, because he’s sat in on at least two meetings about the issue, that the concession to develop these is held by the Egyptian Salt and Soda Company-but it’s good to set a proper landscape to an abstract history of bribery, fraud and ineptitude. Between the grey hulk of a factory and the isolated monasteries that wobble in the heat-glare, a giant mineral lake stretches. Despite the heat, the lake seems to be covered with a layer of ice; what’s more, the ice has crimson patches on it, as though baby seals had been clubbed there. Trickling streams of claret link the patches to blue and green pools. Above the blushing, multicoloured tracts stand impossibly large birds, perched on lumps of salt that look like towering icebergs.

“The mirage,” says the Scotsman sharing Serge’s compartment, noticing him staring in bemusement at the scene.

“It’s an illusion, then?” Serge asks. “There are no birds?”

“Oh, there are birds all right. But the light’s bending and expanding them. Ditto the salt.”

“You’re seeing it too?”

“We’re both seeing what the light’s gradient as it hits the warmer air is conveying to our retinas.”

“And the crimson?”

“Natron deposits rising to the surface.”

This man is an optician, as it turns out. He shows Serge his ad in the Gazette (his logo: a hieroglyphic eye-symbol beside a suspiciously anachronistic-looking pair of glasses done in the same style), then retreats behind the same newspaper, emerging from time to time to comment on its contents, none of which are to his liking.

“They’re attacking Europeans randomly,” he tuts. “Says here a whole train was halted by a mob at Damietta, and white men and women treated to ‘the worst indignities.’ ”

Their train also gets held up, although not by a mob: there’s a defect on the Shouba Bridge. It’s almost dawn when they arrive in Cairo. Serge makes his way past mini-phare lampposts, each casting small cylinders of phosphorous light onto the pavement, to the Ministry. He finds it in a complex so expansive as to dwarf the Alexandria outpost: here are the departments of Unappropriated Revenue, State Properties, Public Works, Justice, Irrigation, Ports and Light, Pensions, Public Instruction, Antiquities, the Army of Occupation, the Suez Canal-and, nestled among these, Communications. All of these seem to be undergoing overhauls: offices lie vacant, their contents packed in boxes on the floor; typewriters, all Coronas, stand stacked up against walls, awaiting relocation or, perhaps, evacuation; people move briskly and anxiously down corridors trying to locate other people who are moving down adjacent ones looking for someone else. Whenever Serge stops one of them to ask directions he’s met with an exasperated shrug; it’s by sheer chance that he eventually comes across Macauley, standing in the middle of a room supervising the removal of three wall-to-wall shelves’ worth of box files.

“I’m Macauley,” his new boss, a stout man in his mid-to-late fifties, tells him offhandedly. “If you’re from internal accounts then you’ll have to wait until I’ve relocated. Spreadsheets are all packed.”

“No, I’m Carrefax,” Serge tells him.

“What’s that supposed to mean to me?”

“Serge Carrefax. I just arrived from Alexandria. I’m to work on the Empire Wireless Chain. I should-”

“Ah, yes!” says Macauley, turning to face him for the first time. “Widsun’s boy. Expected you some time ago.”

“I would have been here sooner, but they’ve had me doing… I have it right here.”

He opens his case, fishes out the second copy of his détaché dispatch and hands it over.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Macauley asks, tossing it into a box that’s being picked up and carried from the room. “First you’re three weeks late; now you’re one week early.”

“Early?” Serge repeats.

“We’re shifting operations to the Central Cairo Station. Offices here will be committed to disentanglement: installing native ministers, advising and liaising, other such nonsense…”

“And the Wireless Chain?”

“Oh, that’ll go ahead-in parallel: through Abu Zabal and another site. That’s what you’ll be working on-but not yet. Come back in a week. Not here: come to the Central Station. I should be installed by then.”

“And what should I do in the meantime?” Serge asks.

“Bed in, attend receptions, buy some trinkets. If you can hunt down Pollard and Wallis they’ll take you to the lodgings we’ve kept ready for you-assuming that these haven’t since been taken over by some righteous mob…”

The lodgings, near the Ezbekiya Gardens, are intact. From their terrace where he takes his coffee every morning he can see the sun hitting the roofs of Heliopolis, the slopes of Mokatem, the City of the Dead running to Matary. The evenings he spends with Macauley’s men Wallis and Pollard, who are a few years older than him. Having first kitted him up with tie and tails in Orosdi-Back’s department store, they take him, as their boss anticipated, to receptions: at the Gezira, Turf and Jockey clubs, the Mena House, Shepheard and Continental hotels, or chalet-like private residencies in Maadi, Abdine and Khalifa. One such event, hosted by Conte Mario de Villa-Clary, chairman of the Maltese Colony of Cairo, has an undertone of suspicion laced with resentment: of the civil servants by the Maltese, who feel that the former have never quite accepted them as “proper” British subjects, and of the Maltese by the civil servants, who murmur into their canapés accounts of double-dealing, bet-hedging and convenience-flag seamanship. Another, an annual dinner thrown by the Cairo Horticultural Society, is spoiled by a choice of menu-card background that’s deemed unappetising by the majority of those at Serge’s table: entitled “De Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensiun,” it shows a palisade tree, or Erythrina fusca, beset by the moth Arsenura armida, depicted in all phases of its life-cycle. Having grown up surrounded by such insectoid mutations, Serge has no problem with the intersecting carapaces and antennae forming a trellis in which the words “asparagus,” “saddle” and “parfait” sit; in fact, he quite likes the picture, and slips the card, before the table’s cleared, into his jacket pocket to take home with him as a memento.

He spends most of his days trawling the markets-the antiques ones-buying, as Macauley suggested, trinkets. Ankhs and scarabs, signet rings, papyri, necklaces. The scarabs come in many shapes and styles: square, oval, decorated, some with beetle-armour moulding on their backs, others with images (the sun, a bird, a human figure writing something), others still with geometric patterns: circles, spirals, mazes. He buys them for his mother and his father, for Maureen, the schoolrooms. For Bodner he buys jars containing pulverised mummified cat, which, he’s informed in broken English by the seller, is a prodigious fertiliser.